“Psychoanalysis on the Precipice:
Retaining our Humanity and Relevance
During Times of War and Violent Othering”
Harriet Wolfe, MD, FIPA
How can psychoanalysis remain relevant in times of war?
While President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) as the horrors of the Israel-Palestine war were unfolding, Harriet Wolfe was called upon to articulate the IPA’s stance regarding the war. In this presentation she reflects on her psychoanalytic and personal journey in exploring what psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic institutions might offer in the face of the ravages of violent conflict. She reflects on her struggle to bring psychoanalytic understanding to a recurrent psychoanalytic dilemma: how to retain our humanity and our capacity to think when in a disrupted state of mind in the face of suffering impossible to comprehend and intense pressure to take sides.
Wolfe will present material from her 2025 article, “Psychoanalysis and the Israel-Palestine War: Perspectives on Our Relevance” in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, along with more recent reflections. She examines several interconnected challenges: the challenge to our ability to think when our clinical identities and potential unconscious fantasies about the capacity to cure are threatened by our inability to alleviate suffering; the discovery of how disruptive and painful empathy becomes when one truly begins to apprehend what the other is experiencing; and the power of projection to divide and conquer externally while striving to preserve coherence internally.
Wolfe will suggest how the “we” of clinical psychoanalysts and the “we” of psychoanalysis as an institution might think, speak, and remain relevant and effective in the current Zeitgeist increasingly marked by violent othering.
We anticipate that Wolfe’s observations and self-reflections on life in psychoanalytic organizations will be a stimulating prelude for our conversation on December 5, 2026, with Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin, “Making a Home Together in a Warring World: Two American Psychoanalysts—Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli—Bearing Witness and Imagining a Future.” With Wolfe’s contributions, we hope to open a space for our collective exploration of the dilemmas we face as psychoanalysts and citizens of a turbulent world.
Learning Objectives
After attending this scientific meeting, participants will be able to:
1. Describe psychic and socio-cultural phenomena that characterize the contemporary Zeitgeist of violent othering.
2. Distinguish the difficulty in sustaining the ability to think within ourselves from that within our colleagues or patients when world events call into question our capacity to alleviate suffering.
3. Recognize the challenges of authentic empathy in the context of unspeakable suffering.
About the Presenter
Harriet Wolfe, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco. She is immediate Past President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
Wolfe’s scholarly interests include clinical applications of psychoanalytic research (“Clinical discussion of Psychodynamic Therapy: a Meta-Analysis Testing Equivalence of Outcome” in: Outcome Research and the Future of Psychoanalysis: Clinicians and Researchers in Dialogue, 2020); organizational processes (“Consultation to organizations” with W. Myerson et al, in: Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis, 2018), female development (“Female leadership: Difficulties and gifts”, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, accepted 2020) and ethical aspects of therapeutic action.
Wolfe has a longstanding commitment to psychoanalytic public health intervention. She has co-authored a number of guided activity workbooks for children, parents and teachers that help children cope with natural and manmade disasters: the current pandemic, wildfires hurricanes, homelessness, war and terrorism (childrenpsychologicalhealthcenter.org).
About the Moderator
Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst practicing in Portland, Oregon. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University. She is co-editor and chapter author of the Gravida Award-winning Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2022, Routledge). Reflecting her diverse interests, recent publications and paper presentations include “Autoimmunity and its Expression in the Analytic Situation: Contemporary Reflections on Our Inherent Self-Destructiveness” (2022), “A Home to the Lie: The Contemporary (Per)Version of Truth” (2023), and “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (2024); and the papers “The Liar and the Truth-Teller: An Analytic Dialogue” (Lisbon, 2025; print forthcoming), “Freud’s ‘Open Wound’ of Melancholia: Psychic Inflammation and Self-Healing” (Seattle, 2026), and “The Jouissance of Hatred in Verdi’s Rigoletto” (Toronto, 2026).
